6.6m flock to Bleak House

BBC1's much hyped version of Charles Dickens' Bleak House got off to a flying start last night with 6.6 million people tuning in to watch Charles Dance, Gillian Anderson et al stalk the hovels and mansions of Victorian England.

Dickens' parade of greedy lawyers, hapless orphans, opium addicts, wife-beaters and cads attracted an audience that peaked at 7.2 million, with an average 6.6 million people watching the hour-long special between 8pm and 9pm - a 29% share of the available audience.

The ratings are a promising start for the 15-episode run, beating the Thursday 8pm-9pm slot average audience, 5.4 million, by more than a million viewers. The episode also won the hour's biggest audience across channels, pipping ITV1's 6.1 million average audience for The Bill to the post.

Before Bleak House on BBC1, at 7.30pm, the return of dastardly duo Phil and Grant Mitchell on EastEnders is keeping soap fans interested in the goings-on in Albert Square. Just over half the available audience, 11.5 million people, tuned in to see the brothers confront their old flame, Sharon Watts.

At 9pm, Spooks kept hold of the majority of Bleak House's audience, with 6 million watching Ben Daniels star as a Russian millionaire with a wallet-full of funny money.

The audience for the star-studded lineup in Bleak House had an adverse affect on Channel's 4's much-trailed new Gordon Ramsay show, The F Word.

Ramsay's obscenity-free pre-watershed programme at 8pm was watched by 2.2 million viewers, a 10% share of the audience.

But 2 million of the viewers stayed with Channel 4 for Blitz: London's Firestorm, a vivid feature-length documentary about the aerial attack on the city on December 29 1940. However, the audience had halved to 1 million by the end of the show, at 11.05pm.